The retired instructor, of Hailswood Square, Stoke, admitted driving without insurance and taking cash for teaching students to drive despite not having a licence to do so.

He was ordered to pay £615.

Prosecutor Sarah Melo told the court that the Driving Standards Agency had been monitoring Sutcliffe for some time before catching him red handed in Grangemouth Road, Radford, in June this year.

He was teaching a student in his silver Fiat Punto when police and DSA officers stopped him.

Four former students – who Sutcliffe had charged a total of £2,400 for lessons with his school Independent Driving – also made complaints about him after being shocked to discover he was not a licensed driving instructor, said Ms Melo.

Sutcliffe claimed he ran a school to train driving instructors and normally oversaw the lessons from the back seat of the car.

He said when he was caught breaking the law in June he had made the mistake of sitting in the front seat to give a demonstration to his trainee instructor.

But Sutcliffe admitted taking lessons himself rather than cancelling them when his trainee instructors were unavailable.

“I was a top grade instructor for some 25 years and the quality of instruction these students received is in no doubt,” he said.

Presiding magistrate Janet Jones-Legg said Sutcliffe’s crime of driving without the right insurance was aggravated by the fact a student was in the car.

She fined him £140 and endorsed his licence with six penalty points.

She also ordered Sutcliffe to pay £100 compensation to each of the four students but decided not to impose any extra penalty for the four charges of providing paid instruction in driving while not the owner of a current driving licence allowing him to do so.

Anger over ‘joke’ sentence

FURIOUS Coventry driving instructors have hit out at the sentence handed to unlicensed teacher Norman Sutcliffe.

Coventry Professional Driving Instructors Association branded the fine “a joke”, especially given that Sutcliffe has previous convictions for the same offence.

Terry Pearce, chair of the CPDIA, said: “£140 is a quarter of what I pay every year for my insurance.”

“It doesn’t make me feel any better about the business he has taken away from us.”

In February 2000 Sutcliffe was found guilty of illegally charging for driving lessons at Solihull Magistrates Court.

He was fined £500. But Coventry magistrates were not told about the previous offences.

Mr Pearce said: “This sentence sends a frustrating message to the driving instructors in Coventry – that people can get away with it.

"People who are teaching when they shouldn’t be are taking their livelihood away.”

Mr Pearce urged anyone taking lessons to make sure instructors had the correct badge displayed in the window of their car.